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Welcome to the latest edition of Dispatches, the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Canada magazine.

As an international emergency healthcare organization, MSF's identity is based on our medical humanitarian action, through which we provide lifesaving assistance to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters or exclusion from healthcare. But what is humanitarian medical action in practice? As you will see from the stories in this issue of Dispatches, for MSF it takes many forms.

As MSF Canada Executive Director Joe Belliveau writes in his introduction, MSF's ability to provide emergency medical care to people affected by crisis lies at the heart of our humanitarianism. "It is the recognition that another person has experienced calamity, paired with the relentless will to find a way to help ease that person’s suffering," he says. "It is personal and hands-on. It is not passive; it acts decisively and takes calculated risks. It accepts the reality of conflict and disaster, but rejects the inevitability of death and suffering. It reaches out with empathy and compassion, but it also feels and expresses outrage toward those who cause or fail to ease the suffering."

Dispatches: Stories from the front lines of MSF's lifesaving work

In this issue of Dispatches we explore several different aspects of MSF's medical humanitarian action: from the delivery of emergency healthcare in Bangladesh and South Sudan to the provision of mental health care to people affected by crisis in places like Iraq; from our efforts to understand the humanitarian and health impacts of climate change to our advocacy here in Canada and around the world on behalf of those who suffer and die as a result of tuberculosis; from standing up for the protection of healthcare providers in conflict zones, and other places where medical workers are under threat for doing their jobs, to our constant efforts to put our principles and ethics into practice in order to help wherever the needs are greatest. We are also reminded that it is the people who are part of MSF who make our medical humanitarian action possible, from the Canadians who work in the field to those who support our cause here at home.

To read the Summer 2018 issue of Dispatches, follow the story links below.

Dispatches is MSF Canada's official magazine. In it, we bring you stories and updates about MSF's lifesaving work, as seen through the eyes of our staff, our patients and our donors — and especially from the perspective of the many Canadians working on the ground with MSF around the world. If you are interested in having Dispatches delivered directly to your inbox, please email dispatches@msf.ca.

In his introduction to the Summer 2018 issue of Dispatches, MSF Canada Executive Director Joe Belliveau writes from Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, where he has had a chance to reflect on what it means to put humanitarian principles into action.

Responding to large-scale humanitarian emergencies has been at the heart of MSF’s medical humanitarian action from the beginning. Right now, one of MSF's largest and most urgent interventions is taking place on the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar, in response to the Rohingya refugee crisis.

At the heart of MSF's medical humanitarian action is the provision of essential care to people with no access to basic health services. Canadian nurse Gloria Yuen describes how her colleagues address the critical health gaps in one of the world's most troubled countries.

MSF doesn't just deliver medical care, but also advocates on behalf of our patients around the world. Right now, we are calling on governments around the globe, including Canada's, to #StepUpForTB by addressing one of the world's deadliest and most neglected diseases: tuberculosis.

Part of effective medical humanitarian action lies in being ready for emergencies before they unfold. As the link between climate and global health becomes more clear, it is essential that MSF be prepared for the impact that environmental degradation will have on future humanitarian crises.

In recent years, health facilities and workers in some conflict zones have come under attack from combatants, in violation of international humanitarian law. But as a former MSF Canada board member and field worker reports in a new paper, some medics also face prosecution for treating people perceived as enemies of the state.

In a chapter from a new book called Humanitarian Action and Ethics, current and former MSF field workers consider some of the ethical challenges that form an inevitable part of our medical humanitarian action, and how the organization can better enable our staff and front-line field workers to address them.

After spending five years as an MSF nurse, Canadian Jaime Wah was ready to try something different. So last November she travelled to Democratic Republic of Congo to try becoming one of the organization's non-medical jacks of all trades.